HoN Mid Wars Is Coming on May 11

By kustodian - 3rd May 2012 - 21:20 PM

S2 Games managed to surprise us all when they announced a new map which is specifically designed for popular Mid Wars games. We all played at least one of those games, where the rules were simple: all mid, no re-spawn and no other objective except to kill the heroes on the other side of the river. Those games were usually fun in the beginning, but after a while, they would become stall and in the end players would end up leaving before the game really finished. S2 thought about this problem explicitly, so they made adjustments to the Forests of Caldavar map to make sure the fun never ends.

Getting down to business, we set out very early in development to remedy one of the major flaws we saw in every "All Mid" public game-the near impossibility to end the game in a reasonable amount of time. Typically games just 'ended' at about 30 minutes from the start because people got bored and simply disconnected. Without a clear goal in sight, the action became stale. As a major point of the new map, we set out to speed up the game so it ends when it is supposed to while preserving compelling gameplay.

Speeding up gameplay to us meant rebuilding the battlefield from the ground up with Mid Wars in mind. With the Forests of Caldavar blueprint in hand, we sliced off the side lanes, threw them over the edge of the map using the cliff tool, and took a look at what was left. With defined edges to the experience, we shortened the middle lane ramp resulting in essentially a streamlined Forests of Caldavar, far better suited to Mid Wars. The paths and juking points on the side of the lanes (leading into the jungles) were cut off and the bounds of the map were decreased significantly to prevent wandering off by blinking or cliffwalking. We also removed Kongor and destroyed his lair to make room for a new ramp on the Hellbourne side that allows the Hellbourne team to move along the river similar to how the Legion has since beta.Source: Mid Wars Developer Blog #1

HoN Mid Wars will be released next Friday, May 11, with its very own rule set and a separate matchmaking system, until than, we will all have to do it the manual way. All Pudge, all mid, no re-spawn anyone?